


She Believes Him

by eluna



Series: Vanishing 'Verse [2]
Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Child Abuse, F/M, Gen, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Nightmares, Post-Canon, Post-Mockingjay, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:15:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23933665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluna/pseuds/eluna
Summary: When there’s a lull in the conversation and she thinks it’s safe, she brings up the issue with the baby again. “Daddy doesn’t want me to have a little brother or sister, does he?”Sighing, Mom sets her hand on Rosy’s shoulder. “It’s more complicated than that. Daddy wants another baby very, very much, but he’s… scared.”“What’s he scared of?”(Or: Katniss is pregnant again, and some people aren't meant to be parents.)
Relationships: Haymitch Abernathy & Katniss & Peeta’s Daughter, Katniss & Peeta’s Daughter & Katniss & Peeta’s Son, Katniss & Peeta’s Daughter & Peeta Mellark, Katniss & Peeta’s Daughter/Original Male Character(s), Katniss Everdeen & Katniss & Peeta's Daughter, Katniss Everdeen & Katniss & Peeta’s Daughter, Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark, Katniss and Peeta's Daughter & Peeta Mellark
Series: Vanishing 'Verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1725196
Comments: 23
Kudos: 53





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to my story “Vanishing,” but you don’t have to have read that one to follow this one. Warning for some child abuse, mostly emotional. The POV character, Katniss and Peeta’s daughter, is about three years old and of course doesn’t understand the nuances of what’s going on, so read everything with a grain of salt.
> 
> Hopefully the characterizations here are believable. Reminder that generational abuse is absolutely a thing that happens even with people who are otherwise lovely and kind.

Mom makes the mistake of breaking the news to Dad and Rosy at the same time. Rosy isn’t sure how she’s supposed to feel—it’s not like Mom and Dad have ever talked to her about the possibility of giving her a little brother or sister before—and she looks at Dad for guidance, but Dad just sits there with his hand covering his mouth and a devastated look in his eyes for what feels to Rosy like the longest time. When he finally speaks, his voice cracks. “When?”

“I’m due in about seven months,” says Mom softly. She looks sadder than usual. “I’ve suspected for a few weeks now, but I didn’t know for sure until today, when I stopped by the healer before I went hunting.”

Dad looks—almost betrayed, which Rosy doesn’t understand: if anything, she’d have thought that Mom and Dad would be the ones talking _her_ into getting excited for a new baby in the family. “I know it’s not what we talked about,” Mom says now, anxiously fingering the tail of her braid, “but I think this could be good for us. A fresh start.”

It won’t occur to Rosy until later the implications of what she thinks Mom is saying: that Mom wants her and Dad to start over with a new baby and leave Rosy behind. For now, she just bites her lip and looks expectantly at Dad, who says, “It’s not your fault, Katniss. Are you sure you don’t want to…? I mean, we don’t _have_ to go through with this. Do we?”

Mom shoots Rosy a fleeting look and steels her shoulders, her nostrils flaring. “I don’t regret this, Peeta. I know that… circumstances are different now… but this _is_ what you always used to talk about: giving Rosy a little sibling.”

“Yes, but that was before we knew that…” Dad looks at Rosy, too, now, and then back to Mom. Rosy feels like they’re having some sort of silent conversation underneath the one they’re having on the surface, and she wants in on it, whatever it is. But instead of speaking plainly, Dad just adds, “We should talk about this more tonight. We don’t have to decide anything right now.”

“Yes,” says Mom, but instead of sounding relieved, she sounds strained.

Rosy cuts in, “What do you mean, ‘we don’t have to go through with this?’ You _just_ said I’m getting a little brother or sister! How do you undo that?”

Mom and Dad’s eyes meet across the kitchen table, and Rosy feels a flare of anger about being excluded, again, as always. “We’ll tell you when you’re older,” says Mom decisively.

Rosy screams a little in the back of her throat, sick of always being told she’s not old enough—to help Dad with his baking, to do more with Mom in the woods than just pick berries and herbs. But when she tries to protest, Dad tells her to stop using his warning voice, and that stops her still.

She knows better than to keep bringing it up in front of Dad, so she waits until after dinner, when Dad goes back to his house for the evening. Her friend Ash says it’s weird that her parents have two houses, but Rosy can’t imagine it any other way, really. They all spend most of their time at Mom’s, but after dinner with Greasy Sae every day, Dad goes across the street to his house for a few hours, giving Rosy some quiet time to read and play with Mom. She misses him when he’s gone, but he usually comes back with a watercolor or something for Rosy to keep in her room, and she always likes that.

Tonight, Dad is quiet and sullen all throughout the evening meal, but after he waves goodbye to Greasy Sae, he gives Mom a long hug and a lingering kiss on the lips. (“Ew!” says Rosy.) Then he plasters on a smile, picks Rosy up, twirls her around in the air as she squeals in delight, and gives her a big smooch on both cheeks. “I love you, Primrose Mellark. I love you _so_ much,” he says earnestly, and she believes him.

Mom busies the both of them with reading from her plant book. It’s always a treat when Mom pulls it out: she doesn’t show it to Rosy often, and when she does, as she lets Rosy handle the pages with careful fingers, Rosy feels like she’s being permitted to hold something sacred. “After this, can we get out your people book?” she asks, but Mom just shakes her head and sets Rosy up with a piece of paper and some crayons.

When there’s a lull in the conversation and she thinks it’s safe, she brings up the issue with the baby again. “Daddy doesn’t want me to have a little brother or sister, does he?”

Sighing, Mom sets her hand on Rosy’s shoulder. “It’s more complicated than that. Daddy wants another baby very, very much, but he’s… scared.”

“What’s he scared of?”

But Mom shakes her head and keeps doodling autumn leaves on her slip of paper. “That’s nothing you need to worry about, honey. Just know that your daddy loves you very, very much, and he’s going to love this baby, too, once it’s been born.”

When Dad comes back over, the whites of his eyes are all red like he’s been crying, and it scares Rosy enough that she doesn’t ask him what’s going on. She’s seen her dad look really, really sad before, but he’s never cried in front of Rosy before.

The noise that wakes Rosy in the middle of the night—no, not just a noise, a ruckus—sends her running out of her bed and over to Mom and Dad’s room. She’s used to waking up to hear unexpected sounds coming from her parents’ room—the sound of Mom crying, generally—and even though Mom always tells her not to worry and to go back to sleep, she always flies down the hall to clamber into her parents’ bed and snuggle up to Mom in between her and Dad until they all fall back asleep. Dad can’t reach out to give Rosy or Mom a hug because of the handcuffs, but Mom wraps her arms around both of them and sings until Rosy falls back asleep.

Ash says that it’s not normal, either, for Rosy’s dad to sleep cuffed to the bedpost, but she’s never really questioned it. It’s just what Dad does, she’s always figured.

But tonight, instead of hearing Mom screaming or crying, she hears her dad’s voice, high and bloody-murder, roaring incoherently into the night. Rosy can’t remember Dad ever sounding like that before. When she rushes to her parents’ room and swings open the door, she hangs back, frightened, and they let her, seeming not to notice her presence in the doorway.

“You’re okay, Peeta. You’re okay,” Mom is saying over and over over the dull-hitting sound of metal banging against wood.

“It’s _not_ okay. She’s a _mutt_ , you’re a _mutt_ , _you killed my daughter_ , you’re sick—you’re sick! I’m going to kill you! I’m going to _kill_ you—”

“Rosy’s fine, Peeta. You’re fine. Everybody’s fine. Just breathe, okay? Rosy’s right down the hall; you’re going to wake her up.”

“Don’t _talk_ about Rosy like that to me!”

“It’s just a nightmare. Peeta, look at me. It’s just a nightmare. It’s me. It’s your Katniss. You’re safe with me.”

Peeta twists around the best he can within his constraints, which isn’t very much, but he manages to roll to face the other way and—sees Rosy in the doorway, and his eyes go big and quizzical. “Rosy?” he asks. “Rosy? How are you here? Am I dead? Did she kill us? Are we—?”

Rosy’s pulse is racing, her skin prickling, and she quickly pulls the door shut and runs back to her room. “Rosy, wait,” she hears her mom call after her, but Rosy doesn’t stop until she’s sitting hunched over underneath a layer of blankets, shivering even though it’s the middle of June.

She doesn’t know how much time passes—it feels like an hour, but it’s probably more like ten minutes, maybe—before she hears a rap on the door. “Rosy, are you still awake?” comes a soft voice. Mom’s.

She doesn’t answer, but the door creaks open anyway, and Mom must see Rosy sitting there underneath her stockpile of blankets because she heaves this big old sigh and comes and sits on the edge of the mattress. The floorboards creak under their combined weight. “I’m sorry you had to see that. Your dad doesn’t have night terrors very often anymore, but when he does…”

Rosy just flops down so that she’s lying on the bed, fiddling with the hemline of one of her blankets. “Is Daddy going to be okay?”

“He’s fine. He’s always fine once he wakes up fully.”

“But he said… he thought you—killed me.”

Rosy can barely get the words out, it’s so far from her picture of her mother—her kind, tired, sad mother who’s never raised her voice at Rosy, not once. “Daddy gets… he gets confused sometimes about what’s real. Something—happened to him when Mommy and Daddy were younger, and now he has nightmares about Mommy sometimes.”

“Oh.”

“It’s nothing I want you to worry about. You shouldn’t have seen what you saw tonight. These are grown-up problems.”

“I can be a big girl for you,” says Rosy, her voice wavering.

She’s expecting Mom to smile or laugh or squeeze her hand, but instead, she just sighs again. “You don’t have to be, sweetheart. You don’t have to be.”

“Are you hurt?” Rosy asks, and when Mom doesn’t reply right away, she peels the covers off her face and sees Mom wiping her eyes.

“I’m fine,” Mom says again. “We’re all fine.” She smiles, but it doesn’t look like one of Mom’s _real_ smiles, and Rosy doesn’t understand why Mom is pretending like everything is normal.

“Will you sleep with me tonight?”

“Sure, honey. Let’s go back to bed.”

“No—just you. With me. In here.”

Inexplicably, Mom turns her head so that Rosy can’t see her face. It’s a bit before she answers. “Yeah, okay.”

She starts—sort of guarding Mom and Dad’s room after that. Rosy knows it’s stupid. Eventually she gets tired and goes back to her own bed, and she can’t protect Mom from what happens after that. But she starts sneaking out after bedtime and sitting against the wall next to Mom and Dad’s door, just in case.

If nothing else, she learns some interesting things.

“I don’t know about this baby, Katniss,” Dad says one night, his voice muffled by the wall separating him from Rosy. “I can’t—I can’t force you to abort it, and I won’t try. That’s not… I’m not going to do that. But I don’t understand how you could possibly think that is a good thing when Rosy already…”

“It’s not too late,” says Mom. “Rosy’s young enough that, if it stops now, she probably won’t remember anything when she gets older. And this baby doesn’t have to go through any of it.”

“Yeah, and how realistic is it to hope for that?” Mom says something in reply, but it’s too muffled by the wall for Rosy to hear, but in response to whatever it was, Dad says, “You have entirely too much faith in me, Katniss. We never should have had Rosy. I should have known that I would—”

Rosy doesn’t hear the rest of whatever Dad has to say, because she’s risen to her feet and run quietly back to her room.

Dad always says he loves her, and Rosy’s always taken that to mean that he wants to be her dad. Isn’t that real?

He certainly _acts_ like he really wants her the next morning at breakfast, when he picks her up, spins her around in the air, dunks her in between his legs and back up high. “Good morning, Rosy-bear,” says Dad with Rosy’s favorite smile of his, and she can’t help but giggle.

Dad is painting commissions this morning, and Mom leaves after breakfast for the woods, leaving Rosy in Dad’s care. Out of all the time she spends with her dad, she likes painting days the best. He always gives her a big sheet of paper and some watercolors on a palette just like the one he uses, and she usually tries to recreate whatever Dad is painting on the canvas on her own sheet of paper. Today, he’s drawing a portrait based off of a yellowing photograph, so Rosy draws people: herself and Mom and Dad, all holding hands. At an afterthought, she draws a little bundled baby in Mom’s free arm. Her new brother or sister.

He ducks downstairs for a few moments to answer a ring at the door, and when he comes back upstairs, she is delightedly drawing a tree line on the wall with her dad’s acrylic paints. “What are you _doing_ , Rosy?” he snaps.

He’s using his warning voice, but she doesn’t listen.

“I wanted to draw pretty grown-up pictures like you, Daddy.”

“Well, don’t. And on the _walls_? You know better than that! I’m going to have to repaint this entire wall now, you know that?”

It seems like an innocuous thing to get stuck on, but Rosy—it’s almost like she can’t help herself, sometimes. Like she _knows_ she’s digging herself into a deeper and deeper hole, but she can’t stop, because stopping would mean admitting that she’s wrong, and Rosy doesn’t like to be wrong. She picks up her paintbrush again.

“Rosy, _stop_ that, dammit! Are you deaf?”

“No!” she squeals. She’s not sure which part of what he said she’s responding to. She’s not sure it matters.

He bends his knees just enough that his face is up close to hers, but he’s still hunched over her, big and intimidating and everything he wants to be. “What did I do to deserve such an _insolent_ , _bratty_ little girl for a daughter?”

Her skin is prickling again. “I’m not a brat!”

“Well, you could have fooled me!” Dad is properly yelling now, transitioning from his warning voice to his trouble voice. It’s no good when Dad starts using his trouble voice. If he’s using his warning voice, there’s still time to diffuse the conflict, but with his trouble voice… “You want me to send you back, huh?” He smacks her on the cheek; it _stings_ , and she immediately starts to cry, pounding her feet in place on the wooden floor. “Want me to give you up and start over with your new little sibling and forget all about you ever being a part of this family?”

She wonders how bad she must really be, for Dad to want to do that.

He shoves her to the floor and whacks her face again, _hard_. She wonders what Ash would have to say about this. Something big and important, surely, but there are some things Rosy knows better than to speak out loud where other people can hear them.

She pulls herself to her feet and runs; Dad chases after her, snarling with frustration, but she runs out into the street, where she knows he won’t hurt her; he swings open the door and hollers, “Get _back_ here!” and she’s ready as anything to keep running, the consequences later tonight be damned, until—she sees Mom.

“Rosy?”

“Mommy!”

Mom scoops her up onto her hip and carries her back into the house. Dad is breathing hard, still shouting, and gets back in Rosy’s face when Mom sets her down, but Mom pins him by the throat to the wall and silences him with a taut, “ _Peeta_. That’s enough. Rosy, go to your room and cool off. We’ll talk about this later.”

There’s not very much in the way of entertainment in Rosy’s bedroom—she usually only comes up here to sleep—and she makes a commotion out of kicking the wall until her toes are throbbing. She’s been quiet for about five minutes before Dad cracks open the door and wedges himself inside, wearing that sad look he always gets on after a fight.

“I’m sorry I lost my temper with you, Rosy,” he says, bowing his head. “You shouldn’t have done what you did, but I should have kept my cool instead of… instead of yelling at you. Hurting you.”

Rosy doesn’t say anything.

“I just want you to know that—I’m trying. I’m trying to be better. And when I slip up, it doesn’t mean that I don’t care about you.”

But that’s what he always says. “Okay, Daddy,” she says quietly, fisting her sheets in her hand.

At her parents’ door that night, she hears them talking about it. “I wish I could blame it on the hijacking,” says Dad, and Rosy wonders what that means. “But I can’t. I can’t even blame it on Mom. I mean, yeah, I learned it from her—that’s where it comes from—but I’m a grown-ass adult, and I _know_ better. I just get so…”

Rosy rubs her cheek, the one that Dad struck. She still feels a sort of phantom pain, even though it doesn’t _really_ hurt anymore. Even though he didn’t leave a mark. He always knows better than to leave a mark, and she wonders what Mom and Dad are going to make up to tell Uncle Haymitch about what happened out in the road. Again, Rosy finds herself wishing she hadn’t done it—hadn’t jeopardized their fragile peace.

“It’s not too late to take Rosy and leave,” says Dad now, and Rosy can almost see Mom shaking her head.

“We’re not going to leave you. We’re not going to do that.”

Nervously, she knocks on the door, and it’s a second before she hears Mom tell her to enter. She unlatches the door and pushes it open, looking from Dad to Mom back to Dad again.

“Can you unchain me?” says Dad. Mom deftly undoes his handcuffs, and he stretches out his arms in a big way. He looks sad, somehow, even though he’s smiling. Rosy goes running up to him and nestles into his chest.

He says, “I love you, Primrose Mellark.”

And she believes him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The second chapter that literally no one asked for. Kudos and comments are deeply appreciated <3

When Rosy gets so mad she can’t take it anymore, she packs a bag and storms next door over to Uncle Haymitch’s. Dad can be hollering at the top of his lungs at her, but she knows Mom will restrain him from chasing after her, and she knows Haymitch will let her stay for as long as she likes, so long as she doesn’t say anything about his drinking. He tried to hide it from her and Briar when they were younger, but he seemed to decide when Rosy became a teenager that if she’s old enough that her peers are all doing it, she’s old enough to handle seeing him do it, too. Her first time hiding out here, she suggested that maybe he should take it down a notch, and gave her a snarl and threatened to call Rosy’s mother over here. She doesn’t make any kinds of suggestions like that anymore.

Today, Haymitch waves her into the living room with the hand holding his whiskey and takes another swig before saying, “Hey, sweetheart.” She’s heard him call Mom that, sort of sardonically, but whenever he says it to Rosy, his voice is full of affection. “You want to talk about it?”

“I wish I could live here instead of there,” Rosy huffs.

“If you think the refreshments are free here, you’re sadly mistaken,” snarks Haymitch. He takes another drink and then sets his half-empty glass on the table beside him. Then, more soberly (no pun intended), he adds, “You don’t really mean that.”

“I don’t really mean that,” she agrees. She flings herself onto the couch, pulls her feet onto the cushion and her knees up to her chin, and locks her arms around her legs. “You know he told me today that he wishes I was never born? And that I’m lucky I have Mom to coddle me because if it were up to him I’d take a beating every time I made him mad the way _his_ mom did to him. Then he started going on about how I came from good parents and he doesn’t understand how a filthy whore like me—”

“He called you a whore?” interrupts Haymitch. He’s frowning, and his eyes are sparking with danger.

Rosy smirks, but there’s no humor in it. “He found out from one of his bakery clients that _their_ kid said that I’ve been having sex with Iris Lockway.”

“ _Have_ you been having sex with Iris Lockway?”

“Well, yes, but that’s not the point,” says Rosy impatiently. “He started to go into this whole bit about how I’m too young to know what I want and how long he and Mom waited and why can’t I be more like them, but when I told him to shove his opinions up his ass, he kind of lost it.”

“I’ll say,” says Haymitch, still frowning. “You know, he might not go after you so hard if you didn’t antagonize him so much.”

Rosy rolls her eyes. “Briar doesn’t antagonize him. He takes it all lying down. Doesn’t stop Dad.”

He huffs out a sigh, takes another drink. “Did he lay a hand on you?”

“Would have, but Mom was there. She did that thing where she runs in when he starts shouting and puts him up against the wall so he can’t touch me. Doesn’t stop him from hollering his head off, of course, but I got out of there before he could say much more than that.”

Haymitch’s lips twist with sympathy. “I can take it up with the courts, you know, if you want me to. If he’s striking you.”

She shakes her head. “Not enough to leave a mark. Not enough to be punishable by court. And nobody’s going to take me and Briar away from home just because Dad says mean things to us sometimes.”

“You say that like you wish they _would_ take you away.” Rosy doesn’t reply. “I can talk to your parents, if you want.”

She laughs dryly. “Which one?”

“Either. Both. Whatever you think would help.”

“It wouldn’t, but thanks,” says Rosy, and Haymitch tries to smile, but it comes out as more of a grimace.

Haymitch drinks his way steadily through the bottle as Rosy dutifully works through her homework. When she’s done, she curls up on the couch with her sketchpad and a charcoal pencil and works on a portrait of Haymitch, sneaking covert glances at him to aid her. She thinks he clues into what she’s doing after the first couple minutes because he turns the TV on and holds himself unnaturally still as he zones out in front of it, glass in hand.

She’s not _entirely_ satisfied with how the sketch turns out, but she rips it off and hands it to Haymitch all the same when she’s done. It’ll probably be pinned up on the fridge by the next time she comes over.

All of Rosy’s favorite hobbies are adjacent to her dad’s: drawing instead of painting, cooking instead of baking. Sassing instead of shouting. She still remembers following her dad around when she was a kid as he did that stuff, having the time of her life working on her own watercolor or pressing the cutters into the cookies. It wasn’t until she got older and he got more hardened that Rosy stopped wanting to grow up just like him, but by then, the damage was done, and her habits had formed.

She sits back down with her pad and does another sketch, this one of Dad, of the creases around his mouth and eyebrows as he yells. This one she keeps for herself.

She makes Haymitch an elaborate dinner of turkey stew and dandelion salad out of the stockpile of food in his fridge from the last time Mom went hunting-and-gathering for him earlier this week. They eat in companionable silence. Haymitch pours her a bit of wine, despite what he said earlier about no free refreshments.

After dinner, she ducks into the bathroom to change into her pajamas—a T-shirt and a flannel over a long pair of cotton sweats. She hears voices as she’s pulling on a clean pair of underwear, but they’re too muffled to make out whose they are.

Rosy figures she shouldn’t be surprised when she emerges from the bathroom, rounds the corner, and walks down the hallway into the foyer to find Dad and Haymitch in a heated, hushed discussion at the base of the stairwell. They both turn to look at her as she enters, Haymitch looking worried, Dad looking guilty. “I’m so sorry, Rosy. I had no right. I—”

 _He’s_ so sorry. _He_ had no right. Rosy wishes that, when her dad gets like this, he wouldn’t make it all about him and his guilt and his pain. “Go home, Dad,” she interrupts. Her voice sounds tight and brusque.

“Rosy—”

“If I say I’ll go back with you, will you promise to shut up about it?”

The look on Dad’s face is _priceless_. He’s clearly at war with himself, wanting to get her alone for a big, drawn-out apology, but equally wanting to do the thing she said he needs to do for her to give him the time of day. Finally, half of him seems to give in to the other half, and he nods and says, “Okay,” and steps backward and off to the side of the doorway.

“Bye, Uncle Haymitch,” she says. She slings her backpack on her shoulders and one arm around his waist, reaching up to peck him on the cheek.

He takes her face in both of his hands—she can smell the alcohol heavy on his breath—and kisses her swiftly on the forehead. “Come back anytime. Say hello to your mom and Briar for me.”

They both know she won’t come back until she and Dad get into another fight. Not like Briar, who pays Haymitch visits weekly or more out of the goodness of his heart. Still, she appreciates the sentiment.

Dad is extra-nice to her, like he always is after these things blow over. It’s evening, when usually Dad is at his house and she and Briar are with Mom at theirs, but today, Dad heads next door to Mom’s house to join them instead. “If I promise not to talk about it, will you come up to my studio with me?”

She’d been mentally preparing herself just to be in this house at all by telling herself she can go straight to her room, and now this. Rosy sighs. “Yeah, Dad. Whatever.”

She sits and draws endless mandalas while her dad paints, well, _her_ —she can tell that he is because he keeps looking at her with his lips pursed and his paintbrush hand hovering in the air. When he finishes, he says, “Trade you?” It’s the first thing he’s said to her since they walked inside the house.

In Dad’s painting, she looks beautiful and strong and confident and brave. Her mandalas look lame by comparison, but Dad fawns over them anyway. She flips the sketchpad closed before he can see the drawing she did of Dad today at Uncle Haymitch’s.

Back in her room at the end of the night, she hears a knock. “What?” she spits out, thinking that it’s Dad again, but instead, Briar edges into the room, closes her door, and hops up to sit at the foot of her bed, staring at her with big eyes.

“Oh,” says Rosy with less of an edge, now. “Haven’t seen you all day, buddy.”

Briar rolls his eyes. He’s twelve years old, but Rosy will think of him as a little kid—forever, probably. “Yeah, and whose fault is that?”

“What do you want, anyway?” she says, but not unkindly.

He doesn’t answer at first, and then he says in this big rush, “I’m sorry about Dad.”

She rolls her eyes fondly and ruffles his hair. “You came all the way in here just to tell me that? It’s fine, kiddo. Really.”

“He shouldn’t have called you a whore. He shouldn’t call you a whore even if you’re sleeping with every girl in the school.”

“Thanks,” she says sarcastically, but it looks like Briar’s _really_ upset about this for some reason, so she drops the air and holds her arms out. He crawls into them quickly. “Really, it’s okay. He’s called me worse.”

“I just don’t… I don’t like the things he says.”

She doesn’t say so, but Rosy disagrees. It’s not so much _what_ she says—which is harsh, but, well, people say harsh things to her all the time at school, about how her mother is a whore and a murderer and her father almost as bad—as it is _how_ he says it. Dad has this way of making himself bigger than you and louder than you and generally intimidating enough that all the shouted bits carry twice the gravity, this way. Of course, it doesn’t help that the rest of the time, Dad is sweet as can be, oscillating between guilty looks and smiles like Rosy and Briar and Mom make him happier than anything in the world. And Rosy supposes that they do—make him happy, that is—when they’re not driving him crazy. She and Briar drive him crazy, anyway—she’s never heard Dad raise his voice at Mom.

“Go to sleep, punk,” she tells him, because she doesn’t really have a good resolution for him.

It’s a good thing she sends Briar back to his room when she does, because barely five minutes later, there’s _another_ knock on the door, although it’s _still_ not Dad—it’s Mom. “I talked to your father. He said you wouldn’t let him apologize for the way he acted earlier.”

“All it does is make him feel better about himself,” snaps Rosy. “Why should he get to, when he’s just going to do the same thing over again in a week or two or three?”

Mom doesn’t respond to that, because again, there isn’t really a good answer to it in the first place. “How long have you been having sex?” she says instead, and it’s beside the point, but Rosy guesses she can kind of give Mom credit for having to care about it.

“On and off for almost a year,” she says, just _daring_ Mom to tell her off, for _one more person_ to call her a whore, but Mom just sighs and sits down on Rosy’s bed.

“Want to tell me about it?”

Rosy rolls her eyes. “Well, the first time was with Ash. That’s how I figured out I don’t like boys. Then I had a thing with Jade Dayfall for a couple of months, but we broke up because she cheated on me with her ex. I’ve only been seeing Iris for a few weeks, but she told somebody who told somebody who told Reed Copperhill, who told the whole school.”

“He shouldn’t have done that,” says Mom reproachfully, as though it’s _Rosy’s_ fault and not Reed’s. “You’re entitled to your privacy. The fact that people even _use_ this sort of thing to tarnish people’s reputations is—it’s abhorrent.”

“Well, they do.”

“I know they do, and I’m sorry, honey.” Mom reaches out and brushes a hand through Rosy’s loose hair. “Why didn’t you talk to me or ask for advice, all this time? Sex is a big deal.”

“Because I knew Dad would flip,” she says, rolling her eyes, “and because—well—you and Dad aren’t exactly normal.” When Mom just looks at her in reply, she adds, “I mean, come on, Mom! You have this whole fake televised romance that you use to keep yourself alive, fake pregnancy and miscarriage included, even though you don’t love him, and then, when you finally figure out that you _do_ love him, Dad gets _hijacked_ and has to spend the rest of his life chained to a bedpost so that he doesn’t strangle you after he has a night terror. You dated for real for _how_ many years before having sex? And you want _me_ to come to _you_ for sex advice?”

Mom pauses for a while to apparently take that in; Rosy feels a little guilty for saying it, but not entirely, because the truth is the only way to get Mom to understand _why_ Rosy can’t come to her about this. “I’m just saying, if I could have had someone to talk to about all this when your father and I were getting ready to have sex? I had no one. I never wanted you to feel like you had no one.”

Rosy feels a hot rush of something like shame bubble up in her chest. She folds her arms and doesn’t reply.

School is particularly awful this week because in history they’re learning about Mom and Dad’s revolution. Rosy knows the story by now—Mom and Dad sat her down and talked to her about all of it before she started school as a kid—but it’s _weird_ to see pictures of Mom as the Mockingjay in her textbook, to hear her teacher offering up opinions about Mom murdering President Coin and Dad rallying in propos on behalf of the Capitol. Reed Copperhill calls her “murderers’ scum.” Rosy is starting to wonder if he’s got a crush on her or something.

Most days, after school, she hangs out with Ash, with whom things are still blessedly normal in spite of that one time they banged last year. She’s pretty sure he’s in love with her, but he never mentions it, so neither does she. And why would she? She doesn’t know how she’d survive without Ash—she doesn’t want to raise any topics that are going to jeopardize their status quo.

Like mother, like daughter, she guesses. Whatever.

Even _knowing_ , now, that Rosy and Ash banged, Mom still treats Ash totally normally whenever he comes round to the house, and thank god for that. Things at home are normal, too, or as normal as they’re ever going to get. Dad’s still in that honeymoon period where he’s doing everything he can think of to show Rosy—and Briar, for that matter—that he’s going to be a better dad, that it’s going to stick this time, that he’s sure.

Only—it goes on for more than a week or two or three. It’s been a month and a half of peace at home before Rosy realizes what’s going on. Mom has stopped allowing Dad to be in a room together with either Rosy or Briar without Mom there to keep an eye on him.

It’s nice, if weird. There are a couple of times that Dad starts using his warning voice on her, but Mom always redirects the discipline onto herself instead of Dad, or else finds some reason to shoo Dad out of the room for a little while. Rosy just wishes that Mom would have started doing this years ago, as soon as she realized that Dad had a temper.

Having Mom handle telling Rosy off when she fucks up is _weird_. Mom never raises her voice or lays a hand on her—just spells out in no uncertain terms what Rosy’s done that isn’t acceptable and asks her to stop. If Rosy won’t stop, Mom grounds her, or else tells her to go in the woods and come back when she’s ready to talk civilly.

Of course, this shift in paradigm means that Mom has to keep coming up with increasingly contrived reasons to either keep Dad apart from Rosy and Briar or keep herself inserted in the middle of their activities. Dad and Briar don’t spend a lot of time together—Briar avoids him as much as he can, usually—but Dad and Rosy are used to spending time together in his studio every day, and they haven’t been able to do that for _weeks_ now, with the new regime. Rosy doesn’t mind drawing downstairs with Mom and Briar instead of with Dad, but she can tell that Dad’s getting antsy, missing her, missing what’s normal to him.

She starts creeping out of her bedroom at night to listen at their door, like old times. Rosy can’t remember how long she’s been doing this for, only that she’s learned quite a bit over the years, eavesdropping like this, and that it might come in handy to clue her in to how long this is going to last or, if it doesn’t, what’s going to happen next.

It takes a few nights, but it finally pays off. “I know what you’re doing,” Dad tells Mom, sounding tired, and Rosy thinks that maybe this is it—that she’s finally going to hear—

“I haven’t been trying to hide what I’m doing,” says Mom sort of defensively.

“Yeah, but you won’t say it. With me it’s one thing, but do you really think you’re fooling the kids?”

A pause. Mom’s probably sighing or something. “We’re not a normal family, Peeta. We never have been. I just want to give them a life without _fear_ , without…”

Dad pauses, too, for a long time. “You know that’s only going to happen if you take the kids and go. Or if I leave. Something.”

“No,” says Mom vehemently. “I promised I wouldn’t leave you. I told you, I don’t care what happens, if you have night terrors the rest of your life—”

“Yeah, but we’re not just talking about me hurting _you_ anymore, Katniss. We’re talking about me hurting _them_. They don’t deserve that.”

“Then why don’t you leave, huh? Why does _everything_ have to be on my shoulders? Ninety-nine percent of the time, you’re a _wonderful_ father, and I don’t want to deprive them of—”

“—a monster?” Another pause. “You know that’s what I am. You know it, and I know it.”

“Peeta, you’re a great dad.”

“Come now. We both know that’s not true. The one-percent is what’s doing all the damage, you know that.”

A long silence, and then kissing noises. They go on for a bit, and Rosy’s almost ready to call it a night and go back to her room when they stop, and Mom says, “You could work on it. You could get better with them. You just need—”

“Like I’ve been working on it the last sixteen years?”

“You could call Dr. Aurelius. He helped me, before.”

“No. No, it’s too late for that. I’m going—I’m going to have to leave you and the kids. There’s no way around it.”

“I told you, Peeta, I’m not—”

“I’m not saying we break up,” says Dad gently. “Just that I move out.”

“But—how am I going to sleep without you?”

Mom sounds terribly vulnerable in this moment, and Rosy doesn’t think she ever fully appreciated before how much her mother loves her father. The history books all say—and Mom herself admits—that the beginning of their romance was one-sided on Dad’s part, that Mom faked it to get them both out of the arena and, later, to placate President Snow and protect their families and friends. Dad is so much more openly affectionate, and Mom always looks so sad, that Rosy just assumed Mom was staying with Dad for some reason other than that he makes her happy.

Of course, just because Mom _needs_ Dad doesn’t mean he makes her happy. Does he?

Still, nothing happens, for days and days and days. When Rosy can’t take the tension anymore, she goes over to visit Uncle Haymitch and tells him—not everything, but a lot. “I’m going to need years of therapy to sort through this mess, honestly,” she grouses to him. She glances over at the kitchen: sure enough, her drawing of him is hanging on the fridge.

Haymitch doesn’t respond at first, and when he does, he startles her. “Why are you telling this to me? Why not to Ash or—what’s her face, Ivy—something?”

“Iris,” she corrects automatically. “I mean—we live in a small town. Mom always says we shouldn’t—”

“I don’t care what your mother says,” says Haymitch firmly. “If they’re going to put you through this, you need to have people you can talk to.”

“But I can talk to you… can’t I?”

Haymitch frowns and sets down his wineglass and pats Rosy on the shoulder a few times. “Yeah, you can, sweetheart. Of course.”

“And anyway—the whole town loves my dad.” She thinks about it for a second. “I _like_ that the whole town loves my dad. I don’t want to change that. I love him, too. He’s just… it’s just complicated.”

When she goes back home, she finds her parents sitting together, talking, in the living room, and Rosy heads straight for her dad and positively engulfs him in a hug. “Hey, baby,” he says, sounding pleased but surprised. And of course he is: Rosy rarely hugs either of her parents anymore. “What was that for?”

“For you, trying,” she says quietly.

“It’s not your job to thank me for trying,” says Dad, sounding pained, and Rosy shrugs.

Somebody’s got to be the adult here, and if it can’t be Dad, it may as well be her.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for this chapter: references of rape (not pictured onscreen) committed by an OC. This hasn't really become a rape recovery story, though; it's still primarily about cycles of abuse.

Dad doesn’t move out, per se. He still sleeps at Mom’s, and Rosy still sees him every day. But little changes begin to stack up until they’re unavoidably noticeable. He stops painting in his studio and moves his easel and paints down to the living room, for one thing. Mom restricts her time in the woods to school hours and starts reading all the time, in the living room while Dad paints and in the kitchen while he bakes. And when he comes back from his house in the evenings, it’s past Briar’s bedtime, and he goes straight up to his and Mom’s room for the night.

So basically, Mom and Dad have constructed a schedule where all the time Dad spends with Rosy and Briar is supervised. That’s fine by Rosy, although it is a little weird to have her drawing time alone with Dad taken away. It’s almost like he stops acting like her dad and starts acting like her—stepfather, or her mom’s new boyfriend, or something. Like his individual relationships with his kids don’t exist anymore because they’ve stopped being _his_ kids.

It gets to the point that she can’t remember the last real conversation she had with Dad. Of course, she can’t really remember the last real conversation she had with Mom, either—maybe that time forever ago when Mom asked her to share about her sex life—but with Mom, at least she knows she has the opportunity to talk if she wants to: she just chooses not to. With Dad, it’s like the opportunity has disappeared.

Mom still wakes up crying in the middle of every night, but Rosy stopped going to Mom and Dad’s room to comfort her when she hears it a long, long time ago. Roughly once a year or so, she’ll hear _Dad_ wake up hollering at the top of his lungs at Rosy’s mother, and she steers clear of that what it happens, too. If Mom and Dad don’t want to get proper help for their PTSD—if they’d rather lean on each other for everything in their lives than develop actual support networks or seek treatment—then that’s their problem, not Rosy’s.

One day, shortly before her graduation, she’s sitting and listening at her parents’ door when she hears Dad start to weep. Rosy has seen her dad puffy-faced before, but she’s never actually heard him cry, and it makes her feel like she’s intruding on something very private and very personal—like she should leave right now and stay in her room for the rest of the night. But she stays at the door, listening hard as Mom tries to reassure Dad that he’s not a bad father, he’s not a bad person, he hasn’t failed anybody.

But Rosy doesn’t believe her, not anymore.

Once she graduates, she’s not really sure what to _do_ with herself in all the free time she suddenly has. Her parents are both so wealthy that she could go her whole life without working a day and still be able to support herself, if she wanted, but the days drag on endlessly without school or a job to occupy her time, and she’s got to figure out _something_ to do. In the back of her mind, Rosy toys with the idea of opening a restaurant, but she’d have to do a lot of thinking it through before that could materialize. She’s got no idea how to balance accounting books to be able to afford to pay employees, for one thing, and she’d definitely need to have employees for supplying the meat and ingredients, seating and waiting on customers, helping Rosy out back in the kitchen.

In the meantime, she spends most of her newfound free time in the woods, not really hunting or picking fruit like her mom taught her to, but just _being_. A lot of her time she spends out on Mom’s favorite lake, lounging around with Ash or just sketching in her notepad on her own. It’s the least stressed she’s ever been, and she thinks life could be good, like this.

And then—

Well.

She doesn’t especially feel like reliving what happens next for anyone else’s benefit, so she won’t.

It feels like it takes an eternity to walk back to the house. Rosy feels naked even with all her clothes back on. She took a long dive in the lake before heading back, but she still feels like she wants to take a bunch of showers—like even then she might not ever be able to get properly clean.

She stands there on the doorstep of her own home with her lip wobbling and her breaths unsteady in her chest for a long, long time before deciding she can’t face them all right now. She thinks she might be in shock. Why isn’t she crying? Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen at a time like this? She turns around and cuts across the grass to Uncle Haymitch’s house instead. Still, she stands for a while on _his_ doorstep, too, before rapping smartly on the door.

There’s no answer. She waits a while, then knocks again. Still, Haymitch doesn’t come to the door. She makes a fist with her right hand and hammers on the wood, yelling, “Uncle Haymitch!” but when still there’s no response, she lets herself into the house.

Rosy finds him passed out on the couch, snoring, his head hanging off the back of one of the armrests. She approaches him, considers trying to shake him awake, but changes her mind at the last moment. On second thought, all Rosy wants is to be alone.

So she races upstairs into the bedroom she sleeps in when she visits here, dumping her knapsack on the bed and shaking out her sketchpad and charcoal pencils. She sits on the mattress with the sketchpad in her lap, staring, for a long, long time.

Then she hurls the thing at the opposite wall and finally, finally breaks down in tears.

By the time Haymitch wakes up downstairs, a few hours have passed, and she thinks she’s calmed down. She hears him clanging around in the kitchen scrounging something up for dinner; then the TV clicks on for a while, until the phone rings, and he turns it off or mutes it or whatever. It’s obviously one of her parents calling, because she’d said she would be home hours ago, and hardly anyone else in District 12 has bothered installing a telephone in their house—but she doesn’t try to listen in, just climbs under the blankets and pulls a pillow over her head.

The stairs creak as Haymitch climbs them, and then she hears his voice at the door. “Rosy? You in there?”

When she doesn’t answer, he pushes the door open, crosses to the bed, and unceremoniously pulls back the pillow and blankets. Rosy retaliates by rolling onto her stomach and burying her face in the mattress. “Rosy, sweetheart, you can’t hide in here forever. What’s wrong?”

He stretches out a hand to shake her shoulder. Her stomach turns over, and she kicks out until her foot connects with something solid. “Don’t _touch_ me!” she screams at the top of her voice. “Don’t you _ever_ touch me!”

She never wants anyone to touch her ever again.

“Okay. Okay. Take it easy. Can you—at least tell me what it is you need?”

She considers for a second. “I just want everyone to leave me alone. And stop asking questions.”

“Okay,” says Haymitch again, and he pats the mattress next to her head. “Sweetheart, when was the last time you ate? Do you want me to bring you up something?”

“…Fine,” Rosy grumbles. Haymitch pats the bed again, and then he’s gone.

She stays at Haymitch’s place for she doesn’t know how long. Couple of days, maybe. Her mother comes over a couple of times—together with her dad, the first time, and then, later, alone—but Rosy refuses to see her. The next time she hears the doorbell ring, she thinks it’s one of her parents again, so the voice at her bedroom door shocks her when she hears it.

“Ash?”

He sidesteps into the room and snaps the door shut behind him. “You were going to come over this morning, remember? When you didn’t, I got worried, but when I went to your house, your dad said you’ve been staying here.”

“Yeah,” says Rosy hoarsely. She sits up in bed a little, the covers falling away. Ash’s eyebrows are furrowed together, and he looks concerned in a kind of dim-witted way. All of a sudden, it strikes Rosy that she’ll probably never love another person like this again, even if she never wants to have sex with Ash ever again, either.

But—

She launches herself into her lap and kisses him abruptly for the first time since they were fifteen, winding her arms around his neck. It’s all the same from the hips up, anyway, isn’t it? Didn’t she like this part, the time she and Ash slept together? Wouldn’t she rather remember this than—?

And then Ash is pushing her off of him, gripping her shoulders and giving her an appraising sort of look. “Whoa, hey, slow down. Where is this coming from? Haven’t we already established that you don’t like boys?”

Her face crumples. “I just thought…”

“Hey, no, it’s okay, Rosy. Do you want to talk about it, or…?”

“No,” says Rosy. “I never want to talk about it. Ever.”

She goes back home the next day, after breakfast with Uncle Haymitch. “I want to see you back here next week, all right?” he says, sounding sterner than usual, and Rosy gulps and nods.

When she gets home, Briar is at school, Mom is out hunting, and Dad is alone in the kitchen. He turns around when she walks into the room and freezes—they’re not supposed to have any one-on-one contact anymore; she shouldn’t be here. She starts to mutter an apology and walk away, but Dad cries, “Wait!” He sets down his mixing bowl, crosses the room, and wraps her in the warmest hug anyone has given her in a long time.

“We were so worried about you,” he says now, rubbing a hand up and down her back. It feels good, and Rosy realizes how much she’s missed her father these last couple years, what with Mom always running interference and them never having a direct conversation. It’s not fair. She should _hate_ him for what he’s done to her, to Briar.

“Daddy,” Rosy mumbles.

“What _happened_?”

She just shakes her head and asks, “Can I bake with you?” Her words get caught in his hoodie, but he must hear her through it, because he nods and kisses the top of her head and hands her the mixing bowl.

Slowly, Rosy adjusts to what has become the new normal. On the surface, her life looks the same, but the way she _feels_ … it’s like she’s become a different person. She knows her personality traits are basically the same as they were before, but she’s taken on new ones, too. Like freezing on the inside whenever anybody touches her. Or not leaving the house without one of Dad’s knives in her pack. She acts like she’s the same, but she’s not.

She knows she’s going to need to fly out to a hospital—there are none in District 12—as soon as possible. To take care of it, if there really is an “it” to take care of, _before_ she gets attached. It’s not like they don’t have the money to foot the bill. But another week passes, then two, then three, and when Rosy doesn’t notice any weight gain or nausea or anything, she thinks she might have dodged a bullet.

But then she misses her period.

When she’s two weeks late, she decides she can’t avoid it anymore. Of course, that means _telling_ people what happened, and this conflicts with her plan to never talk about it, ever.

Rosy knows she has to tell her parents, but she can’t decide which is going to be worse: telling Mom or telling Dad. Eventually she decides to talk to her dad first, if only because she _misses_ being able to tell him these kinds of things—not that she’s ever had a thing this big to tell him, but still.

She wonders if maybe this means she’s starting to forgive him. She wishes she wouldn’t. Life would be so much simpler that way.

That night, she greets him at the door when he comes back from his house at bedtime. He grins at her and ruffles her hair, making to sidestep her so that he can go up the stairs to the bedroom, but she interrupts, “Dad, can I talk to you for a minute?”

Dad breaks out in a big old smile. “Sure, honey. I think your mother is—”

“Just you,” Rosy says quickly. Dad frowns, but nods.

She leads him upstairs into her bedroom, closing the door behind them. When she sits down on the bed and pats the spot next to her, Dad gingerly takes a seat, too. “So what’s going on?” he asks tentatively when she doesn’t make to say anything right away.

Rosy gulps, not sure where to start. Not _wanting_ to start. “Do you remember—?” she begins and then thinks better of it. “We need to go to District 4,” she says instead.

“What?” Clearly, Dad wasn’t expecting her to go this direction. “What’s in District 4?”

“That’s where Grandma Everdeen works, right? I’ve always wanted to meet her, and—well—I know her hospital has a really good reputation.”

“Rosy, what does Grandma Everdeen’s hospital have to do with…?”

“Daddy.” He’s clearly not getting it, looking at her in utter confusion, and she realizes with a jolt that she’s going to have to spell it out for him. “Do you remember when I… got sick, and went to go stay with Uncle Haymitch for a few days last month?”

“Yeah. You never told us what—wait, you’re not saying you’re sick with something you haven’t told us about, are you? Are—”

“Dad, I’m not _sick_ ; I’m…” But the words don’t want to come out. Dad is looking at her expectantly and all she can think about is how dirty she feels underneath her clothes. “I’m…”

“Rosy?”

She looks down at her hands, folded in her lap. “I’m pregnant,” she mutters.

Dad doesn’t answer at first. When she finally looks back up at him, his befuddled expression hasn’t changed. “What? So you’re not gay anymore?”

Rosy laughs a little hysterically, then gets control of herself. “Sorry. It’s just, _that’s_ your first… never mind.”

“Was it Ash? I always thought you two were going to—”

“No, it’s not Ash, it’s—it’s Reed Copperhill.”

Dad’s eyebrows rise up to the heavens. “Reed Copperhill? I thought you hated him.”

“I do.”

“You called him a bully and a dick and and a scoundrel.”

“He is.”

“So then why did you…?” Dad pauses, his brain obviously whirring, and Rosy thinks he’s catching on, but then he says, “Honey, hate sex isn’t the answer. You—”

“It wasn’t _hate sex_ , Dad, it was—!”

 _Then_ Dad gets it. She can tell the moment he does, because his eyes go all big and his jaw drops and his eyebrows slant into a distraught shape, and he audibly gasps and jumps to his feet. “Rosy,” he says, and his voice cracks, and she thinks he’s going to—

“Don’t cry. _Don’t_ cry, Dad, I can’t do this if you cry.”

Dad turns around, walks to the opposite wall, and promptly punches a hole through it. Then another. And another.

“Dad—”

He turns back around. Rosy has seen her dad get infinitely pissed before—has seen him tower over her screaming obscenities about how she’s a terrible daughter and he wishes she didn’t belong to him—but this is the first time she’s seen Dad get _so_ angry that she can see in him the man who killed Brutus and Mitchell. Her dad is a _murderer_ , she thinks. Once a killer, always a killer.

“Peeta?” Mom comes rushing in, then, probably having heard the commotion from her bedroom. She looks from Dad to the wall and back to Dad. “Rosy? What’s going on?”

“Rosy’s pregnant,” says Dad, spitting out the words like they’re poison. “That _monster_ Reed Copperhill raped her.”

Mom looks like she has no idea what to say. She always looks sad, but the sadness grows stronger in her cheeks and mouth and eyebrows.

“Rosy,” Dad says now, crossing back to her and taking her hands in his, “We’ve got you, okay? We’ve got you. I am going to _personally_ make sure that Copperhill sees justice and that this baby grows up loved and cared for even without a father. I—”

She looks at her father—her loyal, loving father who would save her from the whole world, if he could, except for when it’s him from whom she needs saving. “I’m not pressing charges,” Rosy interrupts, “and I’m getting rid of the baby.”

Dad looks—well, horrified. “Why are—? Why would you—?”

“I just want to forget this ever happened,” she says, her voice cracking.

“Oh, Rosy,” says Mom, and she comes and sits down and envelops Rosy in a hug. “You don’t have to decide anything tonight,” she says now, and Rosy feels a faraway memory pinging the back of her mind. “Take all the time you need.”

“You mean seven and a half months,” Rosy mutters, but her hands go up to clutch at her mother’s arms all the same.

She tells Ash the whole story the next day. He listens quietly with rage and something like sympathy burning in his eyes, and when she’s told the whole story, he reaches out to hug her, just like her parents did. _Please don’t touch me_ , she wants to tell him, but he’s listened kindly this whole time, and Rosy must have learned a faulty lesson from Mom somewhere along the line about how she’s supposed to pay off the debt of kindness.

“So you’re definitely not keeping it?” he asks hesitantly, after he pulls away.

“How can I?” she says.

“Because if you need help—I can help you. We don’t have to get married—I know you don’t want that with me—but your kid doesn’t have to grow up without a father. We can share custody, or I can babysit every day, or…”

She kisses him to shut him up, not because she wants to but because she owes him. “I love you for offering, but I can’t be a mom.”

“Why can’t you?”

“I just can’t, Ash.”

Not for the first time, but maybe the most emphatically, Rosy wishes that she had told Ash years ago about—about the way her dad treats her and Briar. The way things stand now, no one will understand if she tries to explain that she can’t be a mom because she just _knows_ that she would turn out exactly like her dad did. After all, her dad was once a sweet, broken boy who became a parent thinking that he’d do everything differently than how his mom did it. What makes Rosy any different from him?

The only way to break the cycle is to never have kids—she’s sure of it. She just wishes she had a way of making everyone respect that without having to explain it.

She wishes her parents would stop fighting her on the abortion, because every day that they refuse to accept it is another day that the fetus inside her becomes more like a baby. Rosy isn’t unaffected by that—she wants it over with as quickly as possible, seeing it as the humane thing to do.

The problem is that Rosy doesn’t have any of her own money: she’s been freeloading off her parents her entire life, including after she turned eighteen and subsequently graduated from high school. She’ll _have_ to fly from District 12 to District 4 or some other district and then foot a hospital bill if she’s going to get an abortion, and that costs money that she has to get them to agree to give her before she can go through with it.

Her mom seem to think that there’s no danger of Dad mistreating a kid that isn’t his own, as long as he understands that the discipline is up to somebody other than himself. Listening outside their door one night, she hears them talking about it, her mother saying quietly, “It’ll be Rosy’s kid, not yours, right? As long as she never asks you to babysit, I don’t see why we can’t make this work. Maybe she can move into your house and you stop spending time there—she can still come here every day to visit, and I can help her raise it.”

When Dad doesn’t answer, Mom adds, “You’re great with kids, Peeta. You always have been. It’s only ever been with Rosy and Briar that you’ve…”

“Do you think she’s afraid of me being around the baby?” asks Dad. It’s Mom’s turn not to answer, now. “She must be, mustn’t she?”

 _That’s only half the problem, Dad_ , she finds herself thinking. She’s not just scared of Dad being around the baby—she’s scared of _herself_ being around the baby, too.

At what must be the two-month mark, she confesses everything to Uncle Haymitch—about Reed Copperhill and Ash and her fears about growing up just like Dad. “I’d offer to help keep an eye on the kid, but we both know how well that would go,” he tells her with a sly smile. “I’ll say this: I know how it feels to feel not competent to become a parent.”

“You do?”

“A girl I slept with a few years after my Games had a pregnancy scare,” Haymitch admits. “The day she got her period was one of the happiest of my life. I never had sex again.”

“Ever?”

“Not all the way. I did still do stuff that you, being a lesbian, would probably say counts.” Swig of bourbon. “For what it’s worth, you won’t know until you try. _If_ you try. But I can understand not wanting to risk Baby Mellark’s safety to find out.”

She starts fighting more with her parents as the end of her first trimester approaches. Her parents keep insisting that she go to the local healer to get checked out and get her vitamins, she keeps insisting that they fly her to the hospital to get the abortion, and Rosy feels like she’s losing her mind because she’s _running out of time_.

“It’s my body! It’s my decision, not yours!” she screams at them one night. Dad tries to hold her hands, but she jerks them out of his reach. “It’s not your life, and I don’t _want_ the life you chose for yourselves!”

Dad opens his mouth, closes it, and then, without a word, walks out of the room. She hears his footsteps pounding all the way up to he and Mom’s room.

“Just answer this for me,” she pleads with Mom, lowering her voice a little. “If you had gotten pregnant before the Revolution, would you have gone through with the pregnancy?”

Mom frowns. “That’s not a fair comparison, Rosy. Your baby won’t be growing up in the kind of circumstances that a baby of mine would have at the time. You talk about abortion like it means _nothing_ , when it’s a decision that should _not_ be made lightly, and—”

“I don’t think it’s _nothing_ , but I think it’s better than—than—”

“I’m sorry this happened to you, I _am_ , and I can’t even imagine the psychological burden you’re carrying from what that boy Copperhill did to you, but it’s not fair to wipe another human being out of existence just because you’re trying to erase the memory of something you can’t change.”

“That’s what you think? That this is about getting raped?”

“You said it yourself, Rosy—you said you wanted to forget it ever happened.”

Rosy digs her fingers into her skull and yanks on her hair. “That’s why I don’t want to _press charges_. I don’t want some jury of strangers calling into question the things that sick _fuck_ did to me and telling me I asked for it. But I don’t want this _baby_ because…”

“Because what, Rosy? Why not?”

She can’t say it. The words are right there on the tip of her tongue—that she needs to break the cycle; that her parents never should have had her and she’s not going to make the same mistake they did—but if she tells her mom what she’s really thinking, that makes it real, and she _never_ wants to have to face her mom _or_ her dad after making what Dad did to her real.

She’s complaining to Ash on the lake the next day when he says, “I think I might have a solution to your problem.”

Rosy doubts it, but she raises an eyebrow anyway and says, “Yeah? Spill.”

“You could have the baby—and I could adopt it.”

Rosy’s mouth opens, full of a thousand reasons why this proposal can’t work, but Ash says, “Hear me out.”

“Okay,” she accepts dubiously.

“Your parents are rich enough that your family doesn’t have to work for generations, right? So they pay me child support—generously—and I quit working in the mines and become a stay-at-home dad. We work out some kind of legal agreement where I keep custody of it, but you retain visitation rights whenever you want. You can even list me as the father on the birth certificate, if you want, so that fuckwad Reed Copperhill can’t try to get any legal rights as its father. It’s perfect. I’ve always wanted a family, and you don’t, so this way, I get to have the baby I want, and you can still have a relationship with your son or daughter without—having to raise them, for whatever reason you don’t want to.”

Rosy considers it. She’s been so convinced for so long that she can’t _ever_ have children that a compromise like this feels jarring. She’s never allowed herself to entertain the possibility of having a relationship with a child of her own, not even now that she’s actually pregnant. She thinks about it for a second: spending her days drawing on the lake or opening her own restaurant, visiting Ash and the baby for a couple hours at a time. Her best friend in the world and her daughter or son.

“Will I still get to see you alone?” she asks softly.

Ash laughs. “Of course, yes. I can ask my parents to babysit sometimes—or your parents.”

“Yours,” says Rosy hastily, and Ash looks surprised, but nods all the same. “I just—you’ve always wanted a _family_ , Ash. Like, a wife and kids. Not… doing it alone with somebody else’s baby.”

“Come on. Do you really think at this point that I’m going to meet someone to make a family with? This is my best chance at it, right here.”

She feels a surge of guilt, knowing that part of the reason Ash hasn’t found someone yet is because he’s still hung up on _her_. Pursing her lips, she says, “I mean… I’ll have to think about it. And talk to my parents about the child support thing.” She’s sure they’ll say yes, but she wants to buy herself as much time as she can.

“Just don’t think for too long,” says Ash, shrugging one shoulder.

She’s full into her morning sickness, by now, and just barely saves herself from puking all over Ash’s shoes while they’re sitting out there on the lake. She doesn’t tell her parents what they talked about when she gets home, instead heading straight up to her bedroom and feeling the rounder curve of her stomach, her breasts, her hips.

She could have this baby. Rosy smiles.

The second trimester is worse than the first. She’s fighting less with her parents, now that they’ve come to an agreement about the fate of the baby—they still wish she would keep it in the family, but they both love Ash, and are willing to accept an adoption knowing that Rosy and they can visit anytime. But the nausea is much, much worse, and every time she feels the baby kicking, she feels like body snatchers have taken over her body and has to remind herself that she _wants_ this, that this is a _good_ thing. She’s gained a shit load of weight, now, and it feels like her body belongs to somebody else—to the baby—instead of to her.

The only person who’s seemed not to have an opinion about Rosy’s pregnancy this whole time is Briar. He’s just sort of—been staying out of the way, letting Rosy fight it out with Mom and Dad, letting her duck out of the house at all hours with Ash, never reminding anybody of his presence in the house. One night when she’s about seven months along, he catches her sitting outside Mom and Dad’s door listening to their conversation, and she shushes him urgently, but then follows him into his bedroom and sits down carefully on his bed with him. “Were they saying anything good?” he asks in that quiet voice of his.

“Not really. Just stuff about Dad’s catering business.”

“Oh.”

“Look, I’m sorry if… I mean, I know that I haven’t really been around for you these last few months,” says Rosy awkwardly. Briar stares. “Are you doing okay? Is anybody giving you any trouble?” By _anybody_ , she mostly means Dad.

“Yeah, I’m okay. Sorry I didn’t stick up for you, you know, when Mom and Dad were pushing you to keep the baby.”

Rosy shakes her head. “Not your job.”

They don’t talk about their parents to each other like this very often, and when they do, it feels a little weird. Rosy spends so much of her life pretending with everybody except Uncle Haymitch—everybody _including_ both of her parents—that there isn’t anything wrong in their family that talking to Briar bluntly about it makes her feel like she’s… “cheating” isn’t the right word. Neither is “lying.” Whatever it is, it throws off her whole—pretense.

Ash is terribly excited about the baby. It’s a girl, they know by now, and he keeps asking Rosy about baby names and making plans. “You should get to name her; it’s your daughter,” she tells him every time, and he eventually settles on Daphne (Wheatshire, not Mellark, of course).

Daphne Wheatshire. It’s a good name for a daughter, she thinks.

Even though they’re going to put Ash down as the father, they still use some of Rosy’s parents’ overflowing piles of money to hire lawyers to draw up an agreement. Ash gets full custody and a boatload of money from Mom and Dad every month, and in exchange, Rosy gets to visit for up to three hours a day, longer on weekends. “Not that you _have_ to visit that much,” Ash stresses. “And that doesn’t count the time we spend hanging out without her.”

It’s not in the agreement, but Ash promises Rosy doesn’t have to breastfeed, and Rosy says that she’ll pump milk for Daphne in lieu of it. She feels a little guilty, not offering, but that would require Rosy to come over to the Wheatshire house at all hours of the day and night, and the whole point of giving Daphne up to Ash is so that Rosy doesn’t have to be around her daughter all that much, and especially not alone.

Mom and Dad have already started their payments to Ash, so he’s not working anymore, which means more time for him and Rosy to chill on the lake and talk about—the future, usually, or Rosy’s pregnancy. It feels a little like he’s lost sight of his friendship with _just Rosy_ in light of the baby on the horizon. But Rosy feels like she can’t criticize him because of the scope of the favor he’s doing her by adopting her child.

They’re lying in the grass one day when Rosy rolls precariously from her back onto her side, tugs Ash close, and kisses him. He kisses back for a long minute before pulling away and belatedly asking, “What was that for?”

Because she owes him. Because nobody has touched her since Reed Copperhill and she thinks that Ash might be the only person who can make her feel loved anymore, no matter how hard Mom and Dad try. “Don’t think about it,” she says, and she shimmies out of her maternity pants and puts his hand inside her underwear.

Rosy hopes Ash isn’t getting the impression that she’s switched her sexual orientation and they’re suddenly dating. She knows she’s digging herself a deeper and deeper hole the longer she lets things go on like this, but, well, fingering is nice no matter what genitals are attached to the person doing it, and Ash never asks her to reciprocate—wouldn’t even let her the one time she offered.

The only person, it seems, who is more excited about Daphne’s arrival than Ash is Dad. Even though he knows he’s basically going to get no face-time alone with Daphne, Dad has eagerly accompanied Rosy to all of her healer’s appointments, runs to feel Rosy’s tummy every time Daphne kicks, and keeps talking about going to visit Daphne at Ash’s house with Rosy on weekends. Lucky for Rosy, Ash (along with the rest of District 12) loves her dad and says he doesn’t mind Dad (or Mom) coming to visit. Lucky for _Daphne_ , Rosy has no plans of leaving Daphne alone with Dad.

But Rosy wouldn’t say that being pregnant has mended her relationship with her father. At its core, there’s something defunct and broken there that Rosy doesn’t see healing anytime soon, let alone in the two months before Daphne is born. She ends up moving into Dad’s house like she heard her parents talking about months earlier—she’s an adult now, after all, and doesn’t really need to keep living with her parents—and she finds herself spending significantly less time with him, since he’s always over at Mom’s. He comes by twice a day to give her a helping of whatever Greasy Sae cooked for her family and to make a bit of small talk, but now that the local healer has placed her on bedrest for the last two months of her pregnancy, she spends virtually all her time lying on her side doodling on her sketchpad. Once a day Ash comes to visit, at least, and he kisses her gently and gets her off with his hand without asking for anything in return. Then they talk about the baby some more, or he poses for her, or she draws something else for him.

“So how long were you planning on having this last, exactly?” he asks one day while she’s zipping her jeans back up.

“What, exactly?”

“You know. The physical stuff.” Rosy blushes—more out of shame than out of embarrassment—and doesn’t answer. “I know you don’t love me back, Rosy. You can’t, and that’s okay. But—what are we doing here?”

“I don’t know,” she whispers.

“I just don’t want our child to be confused about what we are to each other, which means that _we_ can’t be confused about what we are to each other.”

 _Our_ child, he said, and Rosy feels sick. “You mean _your_ child. Daphne is going to be _your_ daughter, not mine.”

“I know, but I just thought—I mean, don’t you love her?”

 _More than you know_ , Rosy thinks, but she doesn’t say it. Instead, she tells him, “We don’t have to do anything anymore if you’re not comfortable with it. I know I’m not good at… at communicating, and I know I don’t love you the way you love me, but it doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I love you my way, and what we’re doing feels good, and—why does it have to be more complicated than that?”

Smiling, Ash bends down and kisses her forehead. “It doesn’t. Daphne doesn’t have to know that we’re anything other than friends. If what we’re doing works for you, then it works for me, too.”

“But isn’t it…? I keep waiting for this to not be enough for you.”

“Not possible,” says Ash firmly, and Rosy wonders if she’s ever going to stop owing him.

When her due date comes and goes, labor is—horrific—and then Daphne is in Rosy’s arms, and she’s _perfect_. Ash is standing there next to her looking for all the world like it’s the happiest day of his life, but Rosy only has eyes for Daphne. “I want to—can I hold her?” Ash asks, finally, and Rosy remembers that Daphne is _his_ , and _why_ she gave her up.

Letting Ash lift Daphne out of her arms feels like total devastation. It feels like a cathedral burning to the ground, or like a terminal sentence. But Ash isn’t taking Daphne away from her completely, Rosy reminds herself. She still gets to see her, every day for hours if she wants to, and will be in her life and watch her grow up.

It’s just that—now that Daphne is here, Rosy doesn’t want to miss a second of it, and she’s going to miss so much of it, because of their arrangement. Because of what _Rosy_ did for Daphne.

After the midwife leaves, Ash climbs gingerly into bed with Rosy, and they just sit there and hold her together for what feels like hours, or maybe like one split second. Rosy doesn’t know. All she knows is that eventually Ash says, “So, um, I have her crib and everything all set up at my house. Just say the word and we’ll head back. Unless you want us to spend the night here?”

“Yeah,” says Rosy, like she’s in a dream. “Yeah, you’re both welcome to stay here.”

A day turns into two, then three. Mom and Dad come to meet Daphne, and so do the Wheatshires, and Ash starts joining Rosy’s parents for meals and bringing her back portions at Dad’s house—her house, now. She’s violating the hell out of her binding agreement with Ash—the one that says she can only see Daphne for three hours a day—but Ash doesn’t seem to mind. Rosy adds it to the list of things she can never repay him.

By the time Daphne is one week old, Ash has all but moved into the house with them, and they take turns holding her and figuring out which cry means she’s hungry and which one means it’s time to change her diaper. Rosy even breastfeeds, even though it’s uncomfortable, because it means spending an extra few precious minutes with Daphne in her arms.

Word gets around town, of course, that Rosy has a new baby at home, and when Daphne is two weeks old, Reed Copperhill shows up at the door. “Go upstairs,” Ash tells her. “I’ve got this.” She takes Daphne and goes and sings softly until the voices downstairs stop.

Whatever Ash said, Copperhill never comes back.

Daphne is two months old by the time that Rosy forces herself to face facts: it’s not safe for Daphne here, and she really ought to send Ash back to the Wheatshire house with Daphne and only visit under supervision. It’s just—Rosy looks at Daphne, and she can’t imagine ever, ever giving her up.

Is this how Dad felt about _Rosy_ every time he went to apologize after making an ugly scene? If it is, she’s starting to see why Dad couldn’t just bring himself to leave home.

It doesn’t help that Ash is the best coparent she could ask for. He lets her hog Daphne to herself all she wants, washes Daphne’s poopy diapers, and generally does as much of the dirty work as he can so that Rosy can spend as much time as possible with her daughter. _Their_ daughter. “I just see the way you look when you’re holding her,” Ash says, sounding embarrassed for reasons that Rosy can’t fathom, “and I just want to give you as much time with her as I can.”

“But this isn’t fair. This isn’t what we talked about,” says Rosy weakly.

“Rosy? Honestly? If I could pick anyone in the world to be a mother to my daughter so that she can grow up with two parents, I would pick you. It’s no problem, really.”

She sighs and sets Daphne reluctantly in the crib her parents brought over when it became clear that Ash and Daphne were going to be spending nights with her. “That’s… actually something I need to talk to you about.”

“What?”

“About me being Daphne’s mother. And what’s best for her.”

“What do you mean, what’s best for her?”

“I mean…” says Rosy, but she doesn’t know where to begin. “It’s about… my dad. And his mom before him.”

It turns out that, after so many years of keeping it pent up, this is a story Rosy is no good at telling. She wishes she could remember actual, concrete examples of things her dad has said to her over the years, because Ash is looking at her like he doesn’t believe her, like he thinks she’s exaggerating, or overly paranoid. When she gets to the end, he tells her, “I’m sure you’re going to be a great mother, Rosy. You’re being too hard on yourself.”

“That’s probably what _he_ told _him_ self, too,” she says crossly.

And then, one day, Daphne has her first tantrum. Not that she’s never cried before—she cries all the time, while Rosy and Ash are figuring out what she needs—but Ash is across the street at Mom and Dad’s for breakfast, and Rosy is trying to feed Daphne puréed food for the first time, and Daphne is _not_ having it. She screams. She cries. She throws multiple bowls of food on the floor.

“Daphne, _stop_ it! Stop it. I can’t—I can’t—” Rosy scoops more purée onto a spoon and tries to feed it to her, but Daphne just smacks Rosy’s hand away with one of her fists. She feels a surge of anger bubbling up inside her and spilling over like lava. She tries taking a deep breath. It doesn’t help. “Dammit, child, just eat the peas!”

She tries jamming the spoon in Daphne’s mouth, forcing it in, but when she takes the spoon away, Daphne just spits in Rosy’s face. “You _have_ to start eating real food one of these days. Do you want me to starve you, huh? Leave you in your crib to scream at me until you’re ready to cooperate?”

She realizes that her own voice has risen to a shriek. Rosy drops the spoon. Her heart is racing, and her blood is boiling, and she—has to get out of here. Now.

Hands shaking, she dials her parents’ number on the phone. Dad answers.

“Can you tell Ash to come back home, please? I’m going to see Uncle Haymitch.”

She bangs the phone back into its holder and walks out of the house without waiting for Ash to come home first. Crosses the street and busts down Haymitch’s door. “Hey, sweetheart, what’s—?” he tries to say, but she just walks right into his chest and holds on for dear life.

“Sweetheart, this is normal,” he tries to tell her after she explains, her voice and hands and legs all trembling. “Every parent loses their patience every once in a while. You can’t judge yourself on the whole by your worst day.”

Maybe not, but she knows that this is how it starts. _This_ is how it starts.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter for real, I think, although I'm open to sequel ideas!

She’s always known that she was afraid of Dad in a way that none of her friends or classmates ever talked about being afraid of one of _their_ parents, but it doesn’t really sink in how much Dad’s temper has affected her development until she has a child of her own. When Daphne throws tantrums, Ash gets impatient, sometimes, but really pretty much acts like her behavior is _normal_. He keeps a level head and doesn’t go off telling Daphne that she’s a bad girl, or that he doesn’t understand how _he_ got stuck with the problem child of District 12, or that he’s going to have her sent away if she doesn’t shape up.

The thing is, Rosy realizes, that Dad always framed it like _her_ temper was the problem, like the normal parental reaction to a child like Rosy was to lose it at her. Maybe she internalized that—maybe that’s why she always went head-to-head with Dad, because she believed that she was the kind of kid who would do that kind of thing—but the more she thinks about it, the more things don’t add up.

For instance: Briar. He faced the brunt of Dad’s temper just as much as Rosy did, even though he didn’t antagonize Dad the way Rosy always did. Briar learned early to keep quiet and hidden to try to avoid Dad’s wrath, but when he upset Dad—when he made a mistake, or did something wrong without realizing Dad wouldn’t like it, or that time he got a D in math class—Dad would still find a way to turn it into a character attack. If Briar tried to apologize, Dad railed harder. If Briar broke down crying in fear, Dad told him off for being a sissy and a crybaby who didn’t want to face the consequences of his actions. It was as if the more Briar avoided Dad, the harder Dad pushed, incensed at not getting a rage reaction back.

Mom put a stop to the abuse when Briar was twelve. Rosy wonders how much damage Dad did up until that point—and how much more damage would have been done after that if Mom hadn’t ended it.

Briar is sixteen now, and he moves in with Rosy when Ash and Daphne move out. It’s a win-win: Briar gets to get away from Dad and breathe a little easier, and Rosy doesn’t have to be alone in her huge house as she mourns giving Daphne away.

Even though he should be happy about having full custody, Ash actually makes it harder, not easier, to accept that Daphne isn’t hers anymore. Daphne screamed the whole first week that she lived at the Wheatshires’ house and not with Rosy, he says. Daphne doesn’t want to eat real food or drink milk from a bottle, he says. Daphne needs her mother, he says.

Like having two parents is what’s best for Daphne. Like Rosy didn’t save her by sending her away.

She misses family life more than she would have expected to. She misses sitting on the couch with Daphne in her arms and Ash curled around them. She misses reading children’s books and playing with blocks and dolls. She even misses breastfeeding.

Her parents don’t understand, of course, because Rosy hasn’t explained to them that the reason she sent Daphne away. From their perspective, everything was going great until one day Rosy had a meltdown and kicked Ash and their daughter out of the house. They keep asking her when she’s going to let Ash and Daphne move back in, and she keeps telling them she’s not.

The only time she feels alive is during the three hours each afternoon that she visits Ash and Daphne, and even then, she spends all her time watching the minutes slip away until she has to leave again. Back at home, she pretty much doesn’t leave her bed. Briar goes to Mom and Dad’s house for meals and brings her back portions so that she doesn’t starve herself. She feels bad about Briar—about not being whole and present the way he deserves his guardian to be—but he’s sixteen now; he’s old enough not to really need a guardian, and she figures that even being an absent sister must be better than letting him live in terror of Dad back at their parents’ house.

The one thing Rosy misses about living with Mom and Dad is being able to sit and eavesdrop at their door at night when they think she’s in bed. It’s been about a year, now, since she last lived with them, and without getting to listen to Dad guilt-tripping about what a bad father he is, it’s like—it’s like what he did to her never happened. Like it’s been erased.

Of course, it hasn’t really been erased. It lives on in the way Rosy thinks of herself, how she treats the people around her—gingerly, as if she’s expecting them to blow up at her at any time, or maybe expecting herself to blow up at them.

She’s lying in bed in the late afternoon, just after getting home from visiting Daphne and Ash, when she hears the front door open and shut and footsteps patter up the stairs. Rosy assumes it’s Briar, back from wherever he goes every day after school, but then there’s a knock on her bedroom door, and she hears her dad’s voice. “Rosy? Can I come in, honey?”

She’s not used to talking to Dad alone. Hasn’t been for four years now. But maybe he figures it’s safe to be alone with her now that she’s an adult and it’s not his responsibility to raise her anymore.

“How are you doing?” Dad asks, innocently enough, but the statement feels charged. In this family, everything has a double meaning.

“I’m not doing this with you,” Rosy says instead of answering.

“That’s fine,” says Dad, sounding pained. “You don’t have to talk to me. I know I… when you were younger, I wasn’t…” He swallows hard, and Rosy immediately feels her own pulse picking up. He’s not actually going to—? “But you do have to talk to _somebody_ ,” he continues, but Rosy doesn’t relax, not at all. “Can you at least just…?”

He hands her a slip of paper, and Rosy unfolds it with a frown. It’s got a name written down on it—Dr. Aurelius—and then a phone number. “He’s a doctor,” Dad says now. Obviously. “He’s from District 13. He specializes in mental instability. He helped your mother when she first… after she assassinated Coin.”

“You want me to talk to Mom’s shrink?” says Rosy skeptically. She’s aware that Mom saw a psychiatrist or therapist or whatever after she moved back to District 12, but Mom never talks about him, and Rosy’s never asked.

“Just—give him a call. Please? I won’t keep bothering you about it or ask you to tell me anything you talk about, I promise.”

She’s planning on throwing away the slip of paper and forgetting all about Dr. Aurelius from District 13, but—after another week of lying in bed wallowing whenever she isn’t with Daphne, Rosy wakes up one morning and fishes the paper out of the trash bin. She waits until Briar has left for school to make the call.

As it turns out, she and the doctor play phone tag for a couple of days before they’re finally able to sync up the following Tuesday morning. “So tell me what’s going on,” says Aurelius. “What would you say is the biggest problem you want to work on?”

Rosy doesn’t say anything back. Not because she’s holding anything back, but because she has no idea where to start.

“Let me rephrase,” Aurelius says after a moment. “Are you calling because of some immediate problem you need help working through, or is it something more long-term?”

“I don’t know. Both. I mean—there’s an immediate problem, but… it stems out of a long-term thing, I guess. It’s about my daughter—and my dad.” She thinks about her mom imploring her not to tell anyone what goes on at home, threatening her with the police, like they would hurt Rosy instead of help her if she attracted their attention. “And my mom, to an extent, but really my dad.”

“Tell me about your daughter, then.”

“I—I had to send her away.” Hilariously, she feels herself tearing up. “I didn’t want to, but I was afraid I would be just like he was as a parent.”

“Which was like what?”

That’s pretty much how their first phone call goes: Aurelius asking a series of probing questions and Rosy getting increasingly flustered as she tries to answer. She feels exposed and a little violated, and simultaneously like she’s completely misrepresented the situation, until they get down to the end of their scheduled block of time, when Aurelius says, “You know, through fifty minutes of talking about your childhood with your father, you didn’t use the word ‘abuse’ even once.”

 _Abuse_. A chill runs down Rosy’s spine. “My dad’s not… he’s a good person. And I know he loves me.”

“I never said he didn’t, or wasn’t. Many abusers _are_ good people who _do_ love their victims.”

“I’m not a _victim_ ,” Rosy spits. “I’m not weak.”

“No, you’re not,” Aurelius agrees, “but you’ve been subjected to what sounds like almost lifelong trauma at home. It doesn’t mean anything about how strong or weak you are. Some of the strongest people I know are abuse victims.”

“This is bullshit,” says Rosy, her voice rising. And to think: she thought Aurelius wasn’t going to believe anything bad about her father. She wants this call to be _over_ —why hasn’t she hung up the phone yet?

“Rosy, I haven’t made any judgments about what the presence of abuse in your family means about your or your father’s character. That’s all you and your stigmas. If you decide you’re ready and willing to move past that, give me another call, all right?”

She slams the receiver back into its cradle and storms out of the house. She’s not due at Ash’s house for another hour, but she heads straight there anyway. It feels good to walk off some of the tenseness, and when Ash comes to the door, he looks surprised but pleased.

“Rosy! I didn’t think you’d be here for a while yet.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, and doesn’t offer any further clarification. “Are your parents home?”

“No, they’re—”

“Good,” says Rosy, and she kicks the door shut behind her and slams her mouth against Ash’s.

She just needs to get the funny feeling out of her system, she tells herself. Then everything will go back to normal and she can forget all about stupid Dr. Aurelius and his stupid accusations of abuse.

But—does she _want_ everything to go back to normal? Acting out her dad’s low expectations of her, watching Briar flinch every time Dad speaks?

After a few long seconds of this, Ash ducks his head and holds her shoulders back at arm’s length. “Rosy, Rosy, wait. Not that I’m not down for doing this, but is everything all right? You seem… weirdly aggressive.”

Carefully, Rosy reaches up to grab each of Ash’s hands in one of her own, then drops their clasped hands to waist level. “Sorry. I know I shouldn’t… I know it means something different to you than it does to me.”

She keeps waiting for there to be fallout from her physical relationship with Ash, but there hasn’t been any, at least not yet. Ash is always happy to get Rosy off whenever she initiates it, and she’s pretty sure that Ash jacks off thinking about her every day, which should probably make her uncomfortable but doesn’t, somehow. She’s just sort of dreading the day Ash realizes that he’s better than this, for so many reasons.

“I talked to a shrink this morning,” she says.

Ash squeezes her hands. “About Daphne?”

“A little, but mostly about my dad. He said… he called Dad abusive.”

“Abusive? Your dad?” Ash laughs nervously. “I mean, I know you said he’s made mistakes, but that’s just…”

Something inside of Rosy seems to deflate, and she chuckles without humor. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

But Aurelius’s words linger on her mind for days that melt into weeks, and she starts to remember little things that start making sense. Her mother’s determination to cover everything up. Her father’s use of physical and verbal intimidation. Her total conviction that she was a bad person after hearing Dad say so over and over. Even—the way Dad would apologize afterward was part of it, wasn’t it? Because he’d always smooth things over by making himself feel better about his own actions, delivering empty promises about the future, normalizing it.

Rosy doesn’t want to normalize it anymore, she realizes.

She wonders how common it is—how many people she knows have a parent like Dad. Ever since she was little, she felt _different_ from the other kids, like her family life set her apart and made it impossible to relate to anybody else, and maybe that’s part of why Ash is her only friend, why she never really got close to the couple of girlfriends she had in high school. Were there other people she knew in school who were suffering, too? Was there a whole demographic of people going through what she was going through, unbeknownst to Rosy?

And she wonders, too, how she would have grown up if her parents hadn’t made the mistakes they did. Would Rosy like herself? Trust people better? Not keep waiting for the other shoe to drop with Ash and for there to be some sort of explosion? Would she never have gotten herself embroiled sexually with Ash, not having felt like she owed him anything? Like she had to pay him back for being kind?

Of course, if she hadn’t had the parents she did, she would have been a completely different person. And maybe that would have been better. Maybe she could have been around Daphne without posing a risk to her.

Eventually, she confides all this in Uncle Haymitch, who actually puts away his liquor and sits there in silence listening to her talk for a quarter of an hour. “I don’t know what to think anymore,” she finishes, bowing her head. “I didn’t think Aurelius was right—I didn’t _want_ him to be right—but now I think that maybe…”

“For what it’s worth,” says Haymitch with a half-shrug, “when you talk about how your dad gets, it sounds like abuse to me. I thought _you_ knew it was abuse this whole time, even if you never used that word for it.”

“Really?” Rosy asks. To her ears, she sounds pitiful.

“Really.”

She doesn’t make another phone appointment with Aurelius, but now that she’s accepted that maybe he wasn’t entirely off base, her whole life looks and feels different. She and Briar go to their parents’ house for dinner that evening, and Rosy can’t look at her dad, can’t even say one word.

Her dad is—is her abuser. And now that she can’t deny it any longer, she can hardly stand to be around him. He’s nothing but perfectly lovely to her, and that almost makes it worse.

Eventually, her parents figure out that she’s avoiding them, which only makes them push harder to get in contact with her. When they call over, either Briar answers if he’s home, or Rosy lets the phone ring off the hook if he’s not. Her mother shows up on her doorstep a couple of times, but whenever Rosy looks through the peephole and sees that it’s her standing there, she just turns around and goes right back into the living room.

Finally, one day, Dad rings the doorbell. She goes into the foyer, sees who it is, and then leaves again, but Dad doesn’t seem to want to be deterred. Rosy hears him try the door—it’s locked—but then she hears a clanking, thudding noise and remembers that Dad still has a key: it is, after all, his house that he’s letting her and Briar stay in.

“Rosy? I know you’re in there.”

She lies down on the couch, facing the back of it, and sticks her head underneath a throw pillow. Dad comes in a few moments later; he doesn’t say anything at first, but he comes over and sits down in the little bit of space left next to her feet.

Sometimes, humiliatingly, Rosy just wants her dad to comfort her. He sits there at the end of the couch massaging her feet, and she blearily thinks, if he could have been like this _all_ the time, her childhood would have been perfect.

But, of course, he couldn’t. And neither could his mother before him.

“Is this somehow about Daphne? About giving her up? Why you’ve been dodging Mom and me?”

Rosy doesn’t say anything, but she shakes her head vehemently underneath the pillow.

“Then—is one of us doing something wrong?”

He sounds genuinely confused, and Rosy realizes that, to Mom and Dad, nothing has changed and Rosy’s life has been abuse-free for over four years. Dad doesn’t _know_ that she’s been reliving all of it all the time lately. How could he?

“It’s not what you’re doing,” she tells the back of the couch. “It’s what you did.”

“Honey, I can’t hear you.”

Rosy rolls onto her other side so that she’s facing out. Dad adjusts to her position and keeps rubbing her feet.

“The first time I had sex with Ash, we were fifteen,” she says. Dad pauses for a few seconds, but then massages her feet some more. “Even at that time, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it, because I had never looked at him that way—I had never looked at any boy that way—only girls. But he was always so nice to me, and I loved him, and that’s what you do with people you love, right? So when he told me he loved me, I thought I owed him the chance to at least _find out_ if I would like it or not. Even though I sort of already knew.”

At first, Dad doesn’t answer. Then he asks, “The _first_ time?”

Rosy’s voice is deadpan and her eyes stare straight out into the distance. She’s still holding the pillow over her head. “We started sleeping together again when I was carrying Daphne. Not—I can’t get pregnant from what I do with him. But we mess around a lot. Because he’s kind to me, and he took in my baby, and I owe him.”

“Honey, it doesn’t… work that way. Nobody ever _owes_ sex to anybody else.”

“Yes, I do. For a long time, I thought I learned that from Mom—that when someone is kind, you owe them a debt, and you have to repay it. But now I think I learned it from you.”

“From… from me?”

“Because I think I don’t _deserve_ kindness. Because… I’m _bad_. And _that_ I learned from you.”

Dad freezes.

“Don’t stop,” says Rosy, and after a few more long seconds, Dad resumes rubbing her feet.

Her heart is thudding out of her chest, and she can’t _believe_ she’s doing this. She just made it _real_. Her whole life, the way Dad treats her hasn’t been _real_. Even when he would apologize for it afterward, he’d use euphemisms or something to avoid calling it like it was.

“I think I understand now. You did it because there was something wrong with _you_ that made you be like this. But you told me it was _me_ who made you act that way, and I believed you—that I was bad, that it was about me. That it was something I deserved. So now I bend over backwards trying to make things up to Ash, because I have to do _something_ to earn his kindness, more than just being his friend. And I gave Daphne away—” she has to stop and collect herself here “—I gave Daphne away because I knew that, if I didn’t, I would be just like you.”

“No,” says Dad, but Rosy insists—

“Like how you turned out just like Grandma Mellark. Like how she probably turned out just like one of _her_ parents.”

“Rosy,” says Dad, almost inaudibly, “you are all the best parts of your mother and me. You could never fail Daphne the way I failed you.”

“And I bet that’s just what you said about _yourself_ when _I_ was born, wasn’t it?”

He doesn’t answer, but it sounds like he’s started crying. She doesn’t look over to check for herself. Can’t. “Rosy, I’m so—”

“If you tell me you’re sorry one more fucking time, I’m going to kill myself,” says Rosy, and Dad makes a choking noise that might have been a humorless laugh at first. “You’d always say you were sorry and then do it again. All it did was allow you to make me— _condition_ me to become more comfortable with the idea of it continuing to happen.”

“Then what do you want me to say?” asks Dad softly. “I don’t want to make excuses. I don’t—”

“I’m not going to ask you why you wouldn’t change for me. I already know that you were just doing what was done to you. I just want to know why, when you realized who you had become, you didn’t leave.”

He’s definitely crying now, and Rosy can’t resist the urge to twist her neck and look over. Dad’s rocking back and forth in his seat, his face blotchy and red, even as he continues to steadily knead her feet. “I should have, but I was—I was weak,” he admits, and isn’t _that_ a turn of phrase when all her life he’s taught her that _she_ ’s the powerless one. “I couldn’t bring myself to be the one to go. I asked your mother to take you and go I don’t know how many times, but she couldn’t do it, either.”

“But she stopped it. When I was sixteen, you both made sure it stopped.”

“We did.”

“So why couldn’t you have stopped it when it started? If all that time you could have put an end to it _without_ leaving, why… why did you make me suffer all those years?”

Dad just buries his face in his hands, overcome. Her first instinct is to walk away and let him cry. Her second is to sit up and hug him until he stops. But neither of those options feels entirely fair.

Eventually, she ends up just lying there next to him, unbending her knees so that she can stretch and lay her feet in his lap. She’s not sure what to say. That he was only a bad father some of the time? That seeing him wracked with guilt ought to ease some of her pain, but doesn’t? She thinks very carefully about what she wants to tell him, and then eventually she says, “I know now that I don’t owe you any love, but I love you anyway.”

Making a visibly concerted effort to pull himself together, Dad lowers his hands and says, very quietly, “I love you, too.”

They don’t say anything else, but maybe what’s been said already is enough.

* * *

She starts a tradition of Sunday night dinners at her house with Mom and Dad, Briar, Ash and his parents, and Daphne. There’s still some weirdness between Briar and Dad, but having the Wheatshires there helps diffuse a lot of the tension, and so does Daphne. She sits in between her parents while she’s eating but then usually ends up getting passed around the table, the Mellarks especially fawning over her since the Wheatshires see her every day.

Having always wanted a big family, Ash asked Rosy once what she thought of the idea of adopting another baby with him. She hasn’t given him an answer yet. She likes the thought of giving Daphne a sibling to learn to share with, and she knows Ash would take the responsibility of raising the kid, but, well, that’s not the problem, is it? It’s that Rosy would _want_ to be jointly sharing the childrearing responsibilities, but wouldn’t feel like it was safe for her to do so. Ash could always adopt as a single parent this time, of course, but then Rosy would just feel like a piece of shit for not giving the baby the chance to have another loving parent, and what with how much Rosy sees Daphne, it’s not like she wouldn’t see the new baby all the time and get attached anyway.

At the end of dinner, Ash and Daphne are the first to leave, as they’re coming up on Daphne’s bedtime. Rosy twirls Daphne around in the air and covers her face with kisses, then gives Ash a half-hug and a peck on the cheek. Most of the time, that’s about the extent of their physical affection these days, and Rosy’s happy with it. Sometimes, when the memory of how Copperhill touched her rises up higher than she can stand, she goes to Ash’s place and lies curled up in bed with him until the feeling passes and she feels like a person again instead of a broken shell. She’s genuinely got no idea whether Ash still has romantic feelings for her, but she hopes that he doesn’t, for his sake. Either way, he seems happy with their little family, and to tell the truth, so is she.

It takes a long time before Rosy stops feeling apprehensive allowing Daphne to be around Mom and Dad, but Dad seems like a totally different person around Daphne than he was when Rosy was young. She’s started letting Mom and Dad babysit for brief periods of time while Rosy grabs some alone time with Ash. Rosy has even started gone on a couple dates recently, with a girl from her graduating class whom Rosy had had no idea was bi until recently, and she’s working on allowing people to treat her kindly without bending over backwards looking for a way to pay them back.

She and Dad don’t talk about the abuse again, but oddly, after that first time, Rosy doesn’t feel like she still needs to. She talks to Dr. Aurelius once a week—fifty-five minutes of dredging up painful memories and checking Rosy’s thought process on the progression of her relationships—and she listens on the occasion that Briar wants to talk about his own fear and self-esteem, and that seems to cover all the talking about her childhood that she needs.

She cooks lunch for Mom and Dad sometimes, and she’s started inviting Dad over sometimes while Briar is in school so that he can paint commissions while she draws, like old times. He paints a portrait of himself and Rosy and Daphne all together, Dad’s arm around Rosy’s shoulders while Rosy holds her daughter, and she hangs the canvas up in her bedroom right where she can look at it as she’s falling asleep every night.

She looks happy, in the painting, and even that doesn’t really feel like a lie. Not anymore.


End file.
